"Open Source" Motif

[David Johnson]

On Tue, 16 May 2000, Thomas Bushnell, BSG wrote:
> Martin Konold <konold at suse.de> writes:
> 
> > Due to the fact that the GPL is according to RMS incompatible to anything
> > except itself dual licensing with GPL leads unfortunately to the
> > fragmentation of development.
> 
> That's not true; the GPL is compatible with many other licenses.

Not really. According to RMS, it is strictly only compatible with
software whose license can be changed to the GPL. Only one license
allows itself to transformed into the GPL, and that is the LGPL. The
reason for this is that the GPL does not all any restrictions to be
added, nor any taken away. So compatible licenses have to be
made identical in every way to the GPL.

This is what the terms of the license says. Actual practice is much
different. A lot of MIT and BSD licensed code ended up in GPLd
software. If this was the original author who did this, no problem, as
the MIT and BSD licenses don't care as long as you keep their terms.
But if you add BSD code to someone else's GPL code, you could be in
trouble since the BSD license adds an additional requirement to
distribute an additional warranty and permission statement.

-- 
David Johnson...
_____________________________
http://www.usermode.org